Well, we're about to elect Hillary Clinton. She's not stupid. She thinks everyone else is stupid, and she's got enough supporters who don't care whether or why she's being feloniously coy about things like her email use (her lawyer just this evening explained that Clinton has destroyed all of her email that wasn't printed out to lamely respond to demands for her records from her tenure at State).

When she's president, don't ask why we elected a stupid person. As why we stupidly elected her. We'll have eight years to think it through. Yay.

What ARE you talking about? The problem you describe is the state being required to be more thorough in investigating matters like the case in question (the lady with the car, Twitter, etc). The solution to that isn't lowering the threshold by which we describe airlines pilots as too unstable to do that particularly stressful, demanding, and highly responsible (for other people's lives) work.

1/3 of people aren't airline pilots.

And more to the point, 1/3 of people don't take out their depression on a hundred or so other families by slaughtering a plane load of people.

Everybody goes through "rough patches," but very few of them kill themselves over it, let alone decide to kill a hundred other people just to add some more drama to it. The whole point here is that you can't have someone in a position of responsibility like that, and have them be one of those much more fragile people who become suicidal/murderous over a "rough patch."

If it takes something bad happening in their life to make it clear they can't keep a level head and maintain their professionalism, then they are not in the right line of work.

"Many people" are not commercial airline pilots.

Dark energy is just the latest name for the Cosmological Constant - I guess it's a better name if it's not actually constant, but the cosmologists I've seen talking about it don't like the new name either (not that anyone has a better suggestion, really). The key thing about it is that the energy density of it is insanely low - I suspect that on the quantum scale it actually "rounds to 0" the way things can in QM, where no measurement is possible at that scale. I think even at the scale of our galaxy it's a very tiny effect. It's a testament to how sparse matter really is in the universe that dark matter is the dominant effect overall.

Funny, in my world, classes called "XManager" are expected to have the "single responsibility" of X, but in a way that needs it's own thread or something to do it right - more separation than the usual class boundary. If X is too broad, expect complaints in code review.

The US Constitution gives the power to ratify international agreements and make them law to the US Senate alone. The State Dept. and the US President are only able to create temporary agreements with no lasting legal authority. That was the gist of the open letter.

The main reason some contests are only available in Quebec is that they are special 'Quebec only' versions of contests that already exist in the rest of the country but other provinces didn't require extra hoops to be jumped through and more importantly, extra fees to be paid to get licensed. That is not a good thing since it creates a barrier that a lot of smaller contest holders just won't bother with. Quebec residents usually lose out more than they gain from these extra requirements.

And 99% of the reason such regulations exist is Quebec likes to pretend at being their own country. So while Quebec has ALWAYS been the #1 recipient of equalization payments from the federal government (receiving over half of all money paid since they began in the 50's) they still like to duplicate federal services and add unneeded regulations just to show they have the power within their borders.

That's a pretty broad exclusion to be enforceable.

my kingdom for a mod point!

They will have no shortage of advertisers for a Top Gear like show with Clarkson at the head.

Car manufacturers may be the primary goto guys for ad space but when a show is watched by 350 million people and pulls in a profit of 40-50 million pounds/year (not that whatever show he starts up, if he does will necessarily pull those numbers) everyone from cell phone companies to children's toys will be clamoring to buy available commercial slots.

Even a lot of car companies don't view negative reviews on Top Gear as a bad thing. Some use it as a challenge to do better next time and others are just happy to have their cars seen.

Manufactures like Ferrari, Maclaren, Pagani aren't really going to be spending money on 30 second commercials for a car show anyway but Ford, GM, Honda, Kia etc will and for them having their 8 thousand dollar family car reviewed poorly against a F40 isn't a real showstopper.

They talk about how much gas super cars use all the time, even sometimes mentioning that they are only capable of x laps before refueling. It's usually just a interesting tidbit they throw in while talking back and forth because it's not a major testing hurdle. Besides track tests watch any of their road trips and it will almost certainly be mentioned if one of their cars requires fueling more often than the others and that's when it only takes less than 5 minutes to refuel and get going again, as opposed to 3.5+ hours for a Tesla (at the time) so it's a MUCH bigger deal if your Tesla run out of juice.

It becomes a focus of the review simply because it is a major weakness in the design which is true for all pure EVs. If they had a battery swap option then it probably wouldn't have even been brought up except for a one liner about "we had the swap the batteries ever x laps".

I think this was a contract year for all the Top gear presenters so he would have been free to leave anyway, this just gives him the ability to do so without any bad feelings from his fans.

True Clarkson fans won't be surprised he over reacted and hit a producer and got himself fired , he's gotten close enough to that several times in the past, but they may have seen it as a betrayal if he just announced out of the blue that he was leaving the show to do something else. As long as the producer that was hit wasn't seriously hurt, which all reports say he wasn't, then fans will write off almost any action by Clarkson as Jeremy being Jeremy.

I'm not saying this was all planned out in advance but I do think this was one of the best outcomes for Clarkson if he was looking to leave TG.

No, he's saying it should be illegal to keep things like mental instability and dangerous suicidal mindsets secret from the state when the state is what licenses you to be entrusted, day-in, day-out, with the lives of hundreds of people. If you've got mental problems, don't look for a job where that is by definition a disqualifier. It appears this German guy knew that, and was hiding his problems from his employer and the regulatory agencies that license his operation of giant passenger aircraft.